November 22, 2012

Dear fellow survivors and those who are still struggling,

Its been a pleasure to see this blog being used by so many people across the world, from the Virgin Islands to Madagascar. It is also enthusing to see that a lot of people have found the articles helpful, particularly in times of pre-examination or submission distress.

Yet, it has also been the source of much disappointment as the blog doesn’t seem to have triggered much sharing of ideas and opinions among students thinking and writing independently and has instead done exactly the reverse and given people an easy option out of doing independent research.

Given that this was by no means the purpose of the blog and that there are hardly any new works being contributed to the set of essays already uploaded, leading the blog to stagnate. We are extremely sorry to announce that we might pull this blog off the web in a weeks time unless there are some new contributions. So for the last time, do send in any original essays, articles and assignments that you may have pertaining to literature, culture, textual politics at survivingbaenglish@gmail.com.

Sorry for sounding so uptight! It hurts us mortally to sound like stern anti-plagiarism sticklers for academic originality, but such is life!

August 30, 2012

Its been two years since this blog began! We had almost forgotten about it, until one fine day we logged on and were overwhelmed to see more than 50,000 hits from more than 100 countries! Since this was envisioned as a collective initiative, we would love to receive original works from you to add to the blog and build this archive of student’s creative endeavours! Please email us at survivingbaenglish@gmail.com.
We are delighted to hear that this blog has helped many and we look forward to your contributions to helping it grow!

January 23, 2010

We are a group of students of literature (from the University of Delhi, India), tortured and traumatized by the English canon. The aim of this blog is to ensure that nobody ever gets similarly subjugated and distressed by colonial relics such as Dryden, Pope, Sydney and Spencer, who people our nightmares the night before examinations or submission deadlines.

On the brighter side, this is also a forum where interesting and redeeming texts such as Chronicles of a Death Foretold, Toba Tek Singh and others in that league could be collectively better appreciated and reinvented.

This also hopes to act as an impetus to the academic production among students by facilitating a sharing of ideas and insights. Students together end up producing mountains of critical work on and around texts as assignments, driven by the fascist dictates of internal assessment. Its a shame that most of this never gets read by any body apart from the teacher evaluating the scripts. Imagine such humongous waste of ingenious ideas and critical insights which otherwise could have been collectively developed and creatively used by students all over.

We request all to contribute whatever assignments, notes and critical material that they feel might be relevant to the fulfillment of the objectives mentioned above at survivingbaenglish@gmail.com . It is requested that no names be put in the documents.

STATUTORY WARNING:There are serious copyleft issues involved. Any attempts at claiming or crediting authorship would be in blatant violation of all codes of creative sharing that this collective upholds, and the defaulter would be seen as a tacit collaborator and upholder of the Gradgrind school of thought.